The Wheel in Space

Cybermats are cool. And "The Wheel in Space" has Cybermats, which makes it just a little bit more cool than it would be otherwise. The Cybermats are an inspired invention - like the TARDIS, the Daleks and the series itself, they shouldn't really work, but they do. Born, as were so many things, out of a contrived effort to target the toyshops, Cybermats look bizarre but at the same time quite cute, and so join the ranks of monsters we love to see again. But what exactly are they?

If they had a concept, which they don't, it would be completely ill-fitting to that of the Cybermen, mechanised humans with electronic circuitry where a heart should be. Someone, somewhere decided that these robotic killers should (wait for it) have pets. And these pets should be little silver fish that wriggle along and then kill people. How they kill people is never quite established. In "Tomb" there are mentions made to them homing in on human brainwaves, although what they do then is a mystery. By "The Wheel in Space" they have acquired the ability to apparently paralyse from a short-range distance as their eyes light up. "Revenge" finally settled on them excreting a poison, but this is a far too real and therefore boring idea and the Cybermats were never seen again thereafter.

The notion of the Cybermen building small robotic creatures to act as servants is a strange one, although it just about works in the context of being sneaky. In "Tomb" it makes for a great unsettling realisation when they are dispatched (presumably the Tomb was built complete with little rodent sized tunnels and mouse holes) that a closed door is not enough to stop them. In "Wheel" and "Revenge" it acts as an effective way of establishing the presence of the Cybermen without having to show one. For older viewers who remember previous encounters, it's a chance to deduce who's about to show up, and for youngsters they make for another fun and inspiring terror. They epitomised one of the greatest strengths of the Cybermen when they were used well - the establishing of the threat in the shadows, waiting to emerge. And all this is enough to stop anyone from ever questioning a belief in something that is frankly absurd. The Cybermats could only ever have been a Doctor Who invention.

I mentioned above that the Cybermats were built by the Cybermen. This seems the most likely explanation of their coming into being; it's been hinted elsewhere that they are real creatures (rats, perhaps) that have been 'Cyberised' but if we take this on board then we also have to consider the notion of Cyberrabbits or Cyberdonkeys which is just silly. Sillier than Cyber-rats though? Hmmm. Luckily the Cybermats were saved from losing dignity by the production team of the eighties forgetting to bring them back when they devised "Earthshock", a story in which, funnily enough, they used robotic servants to pre-empty their arrival and pick off some human geologists. From then on, though, the Cybermen simply turned up at the end of the first episode like all the other monsters. What was lost, and what the Cybermats provided, was a clue to the oncoming terror, a shorthand to the menace waiting in the wings.

"Wheel" is the story that best pulls off this trick, although it's performed here mainly because they only had two actual Cybermen costumes. For the first few episodes, we are scared by their hidden presence, just like in "The Moonbase" and the "The Invasion", a lurking threat that is suggested rather than seen. In the Eighties they tellingly thought that the updated costumes were the true tradition of the Cybermen. In fact it was the Cybermats that stood for what made them most frightening since, as we all know, it's not what you see, but what you imagine to be around the corner, that's most scary.